Boeing CEO’s gift helps theater’s finances

SEATTLE — Surprise, here’s $500,000.

That, in essence, is what Boeing Co. chief executive Phil Condit and his wife, Geda Maso Condit, sprung shortly before a fund-raising event for the hard-pressed A Contemporary Theatre.

Condit is chairman of the nonprofit theater’s board of trustees, but managing director Susan Trapnell said the couple first told her of the donation Monday evening.

"I knew they’d been thinking about doing something for the theater, but I didn’t know what it would be," Trapnell said.

She said she hoped the money would help to restore financial stability for the city’s second-oldest professional theater company, hard hit by declining ticket sales and donations in recent years.

In February the theater’s 25 board members agreed to pay $40,000 out of their own pockets to help keep the downtown playhouse from shutting down after 38 years.

Many have traced the company’s troubles to a move in 1996 to the Eagles building, a landmark ACT paid $30 million to renovate after a solvent tenure at its initial location near the Seattle Center.

Working to retire a $1.7 million debt, ACT has paid or renegotiated much of the $700,000 that was owed to vendors but must still pay off a $1 million line of bank credit it went through — money that Condit personally guaranteed.

ACT also has benefited from favorable reviews and ticket sales for the first three shows of the current season, which was shortened to meet a scaled-down $3.9 million budget.